


The Final Girl

by EveryoneHasAmnesia



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Cannibalism, Case Fic, Crime Scene Description, Gore, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, M/M, Slash flick inspired, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, engaged hannigram, it's hannibal ok, they have an arrangement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:20:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29612808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EveryoneHasAmnesia/pseuds/EveryoneHasAmnesia
Summary: Will looked at his meal. The strips of beef almost glowed in their pale broth. They looked tender, tasty. Excellently seasoned. Human? He couldn't tell.“It was dramatic,” he said. “The scene. Very messy, very theatrical. Juvenile, even.”“Sounds like the work of a teenager.”“And with so much carnage, it’s impossible to say for sure whether every body was fully intact or not. Pieces could be missing and we’d never know.”
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 71
Collections: Hannibal Flash Fic #006





	The Final Girl

“I never got the appeal of slasher flicks,” Jack Crawford said, standing over the burned out remains of a campfire. Feet in ash was just about the only place you could stand without getting blood on your shoes. The techs had photographed the scene extensively and then started laying out walkways, plastic paths over the ground that would let them get, sooner or later, to all the chunks scattered around. 

“Popular in high school, Jack?” Will asked. He was standing at the edge of the scene, on one of the last patches of clean sand before the carnage took over. The pebbly-sand of the lakeside was a rusty brown in the mid morning sun, and the smell that rose from it as it heated, mixed with the smoky ash from the campfire, put him in mind of smores and hot dogs roasted too close to the flames so you tasted a little ash with every bite. He didn’t want to mount the plastic pathways. It was too sterile, too removed--literally--from the scene for him to do his work there. 

Jack glanced at Will, perhaps surprised to be making small talk, perhaps just trying to see how much resentment Will carried in the hunch of his shoulders. 

“I guess I was. Not the most popular guy in school, but I held my own. I played football, got good grades. Had a couple of girlfriends and a couple more offers. Usual stuff.” 

“Linebacker?” Zeller asked. Jack shot him a look. 

“Running back,” he countered. “And I could really move it, yes. Played right through my second year of college. Until I separated my shoulder, and then that was it.” 

“Couldn’t get back to it?” 

“Didn’t want to. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do that I couldn’t do ground to dust on the football field.” 

Will had stopped listening a while ago, surveying the clearing. Whatever had happened had happened fast. There were at least three dead teens, their bodies hacked up but not arranged, not stylized unless the sheer chaos was a style. When you put a chainsaw to a body, it doesn’t actually do much for it; pieces don’t go sailing away, whatever the movies put on, it just falls like bricks or wood. Nothing fancy. Will knew that intimately. 

So the display was done for show, staging. Making it seem that people had run through to the end, like the killer was hacking off bits of them on the fly. Will remembers, suddenly the vividly, the chase sequence in every single Scooby-Do cartoon. The gang all running, single file, in one door and out another down a long hallway with the monster of the week chasing behind them, only halfway through they’d come out the door with the monster someone mixed up in the middle, or with Scooby chasing it instead of the other way around, and there’d be a comedic gulp at the mix up. Scooby and sometimes Shaggy would jump and windmill their legs in mid air, winding up as they defied gravity, and then everything would lurch into motion again. 

“Will?” Jack’s voice said that this wasn’t the first time he’s said that, but it’s the first one that reached Will. He lifted his head from the scene and Jack repeated himself. “Why did you ask me that?” 

“Slasher films are for people who weren’t popular in high school,” Will explained. “It’s a revenge fantasy. Even the camp ones. No one wants to see the jock get cut in half if they were the jock.” 

“You watch a lot of horror films?” Jack countered, and Will just shrugged. Not on purpose, but there were times when he’d watched a lot of late night TV, good, bad, and otherwise. Nowadays he preferred a long walk with the dogs and a few pulls of whiskey if he really wasn’t going to sleep without a fight. He saw enough gore in his work to satisfy the urge to seek out any more. Almost. 

Jack looked ready to ask more questions, so Will turned up his coat collar against the chill. It was unseasonably cold today, a late spring morning that would have been better suited for early March, when plants gambled with whether they’d avoid the first frost by budding now and some lost. The last several days had been excellent camping weather, but that streak was over--fortunate, perhaps, that this camping trip was already at an end. 

Protected from the chill, Will closed his eyes. He took away the plastic strips first. Then the officers, the science team, the caution tape flapping in the chill wind. He poured the blood back into the bodies and watched flesh knit itself whole. The sun reversed in the sky. The fire, like a phoenix, exploded upwards from the ash, and Will remained just where he was standing, looking at the black silhouettes of people crossing back and forth in front of it, swapping bottles and kisses in the red light. He could feel the clunky weight of a chainsaw in his hand, smell the oil and gas. Then he stepped forward, deliberately, getting as close as possible before ripping the cord and starting this darkly comedic chase sequence. 

One thing didn’t add up, he found, as he came back to himself. The encounter was unbalanced, the numbers felt off in a way that he couldn’t adequately describe. There was a vital piece missing, here, and he was sure that he knew what it was. 

“Somebody got away,” Will said. He turned, eyes tracking over the shoreline, down to the boat ramp and dock about a quarter of a mile away. Not too far, normally, but a long way to run with a chainsaw. 

He started for the dock. 

\---

“A celebration of life,” Hannibal said. He placed the meal in front of Will with a slight flourish. It’s a bit of an eclectic plate, a tasting menu that evokes tapas or appetizers. There’s caviar, poached quail’s eggs, the delicate petals of a flower Will doesn’t immediately recognize but which, he’s sure, have some deeply symbolic meaning. Thin strips of beef cooked in the teacup sized bowl by a hot broth, just one step up from raw. “You saved a young woman today. While this is, of course, far from your first time saving a life, it is in a direct way you’ve only had occasion to do once before, I believe.”

“Strictly speaking, you saved Abigail’s life in that kitchen,” Will answered. 

“Which I would not have been able to do had you not shot her father.” 

“Call it a draw.” Will wasn’t rude enough to actually pick at his food, but he picked up his fork and then merely held it. 

“You’re not satisfied with the outcome,” Hannibal said. He didn’t wait for Will to dig in. He began to eat, unconcerned with the topic at hand. He had an iron stomach that way, Will thought. Nothing has ever put him off a meal. 

“She was basically alright,” Will said. “The water must have been about sixty degrees. Maybe less. She hid for hours under a dock, holding on to the supports so she didn’t drift away, for… being generous, about six and a half hours? She says she was too afraid to come out even after the sun came up, claimed she didn’t hear anyone until I walked onto the dock. But she also says she doesn’t remember exactly what happened.” 

“You don’t believe her? No, worse, you suspect her. And it doesn’t sit right with you.” 

“She doesn’t fit the profile. She’s popular, boyfriend--hacked to pieces now--, good grades, college acceptance letters from two decent schools. The perfect average student. And physically, well. She’s only five foot three. Chainsaws make everyone equal heights, but she’d have to have the strength to wield it. To chase someone down.” 

“So she’s not a suspect. To you.” Hannibal arched an eyebrow. “And that doesn’t sit right with you either. You’re a difficult man to please, Will. Must be a nightmare to shop for.” 

“She feels… like an easy answer,” Will said. He looked up at Hannibal, at his perfect suit, perfect hair. “Just twisted enough to be satisfying. Or trying to be. I thought you went out last night.” Will changed topic with no pause, no preface, but no surprise flickered on Hannibal’s face. 

“Oh? I did not.” 

“I know. I came downstairs and you were playing theremin for the dogs. That was five in the morning. So you would have had to have left the campsite by four-fifteen. Left her in the water about then. Park rangers found the bodies at eight when they came to clear out the campsites of stragglers. It’s a tight timeline. I don’t know that you could manage it.” 

Hannibal did not rise to the obvious bait. He did not protest that he could pull off any amazing feats of timing, or even remind Will that he already has pulled off several known cases with even less time. He shook his head and continued eating. “This is the issue with our arrangement, Will. You’re always going to wonder. One night where I slept poorly and you’re just a hair’s breadth from accusing me of things difficult to take back.” 

Will looked at his meal. The strips of beef almost glowed in their pale broth. They looked tender, tasty. Excellently seasoned. Human? He couldn't tell. 

“It was dramatic,” he said. “The scene. Very messy, very theatrical. Juvenile, even.” 

“Sounds like the work of a teenager.” 

“And with so much carnage, it’s impossible to say for sure whether every body was fully intact or not. Pieces could be missing and we’d never know.” 

“I’m sure some are. A few hours is plenty of time for the more enterprising scavengers to fill their bellies.” Hannibal started to smile, just at the edges of his mouth. 

“What?” Will asked. At the questioning look, he rolled his eyes. “You’re happy. Why?”

“It seems to me I have every reason to be happy. I have a good meal in front of me. A satisfying day in the office to be proud of. And even toothless, even in a sea of domesticity, I own your imagination. You’ll see echoes of me in every scene until the end of time, even if I never pick up a scalpel again.” 

Will picked up his bowl of broth. It smelled devine, savory, notes of saffron on the steam. He tilted his head back and drank the broth down in one gulp, strips of meat and all, and never chewed them as they went. Hannibal’s small smile became a wide and rewarding grin.


End file.
